Interview with Tom Özden-Schilling, Rappaport Prize Finalist

Your dissertation research focused on forest ecologists and Indigenous Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists mapping and modeling ecological succession patterns and land use changes on the traditional territories of the Gitanyow and Gitxan First Nations in British Colombia. How did you come to pursue research in this region and on this topic? What influences, personal or intellectual, shaped your larger project?

The path that brought me to northwest British Columbia was a fairly circuitous one. I had come to know a bit about the region through some preliminary research on mineral exploration in coastal Alaska. When I finally crossed over into BC for the first time in 2011, I was struck by how many different people that I met up there were these highly trained technical professionals who had just been cobbling together odd jobs for years, even a couple decades in some cases. I thought that I was going to be asking questions about epistemology and expert positionality as it related to all of these different technical images that I had grown infatuated with back home in Boston – forest cover maps, historic ice flow models, ecological succession simulations, culturally modified tree database visualizations, stuff like that. But when I saw how frequently these people changed jobs and the intimate pressures that accompanied these shifts, I realized that it didn’t make any sense at all to talk in monolithic terms about “government” or “settler” or “First Nations” senses of place or perspectives on land use changes. I also wasn’t sure how to think about all of this through the lens of precariousness, since so many of the people I met were quite happy with their professional arrangements. Many of them had moved to northwest BC in the 1980s and ‘90s precisely because they wanted this kind of flexibility.

On a personal level, I grew up in a small town in Wyoming that was a lot like the area where I did my fieldwork: way more technical degree holders and PhDs than you’d expect in a rural area; lots of US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management contracts keeping families afloat; a fair amount of traffic from wilderness-oriented tourists; and different kinds of tension between local whites and the Arapaho and Shoshone communities who lived on and around the huge Wind River Indian Reservation a few miles away. Spending time in Canada felt like a chance to think through some of the dilemmas that had excited and puzzled me as a kid growing up in Wyoming, but without having to personally confront the whole cast of characters from my youth. It also felt like a way to open up lines of conversation with other technicians and scientists working in rural areas, who have very particular politics and commitments to place, and who, in many cases, have been constantly put upon to explain and justify their work as land management policies and the land itself keeps changing.

Intellectually, I’m a big fan of critical cartographers like Bill Rankin, Brian Harley, and John Pickles, as well as of people who have really put science and technology studies to work with indigenous interlocutors, people like Paul Nadasdy, Kim TallBear, and Candis Callison. On the whole, though, I eventually came to see my project as a way to think about intersections of identity politics, subjectivity, and vocation. For the people I worked with, all of these big, ponderous things are intensely mediated by rapidly changing environments, and by computer simulators, GPS technologies, and other kinds of instruments which are changing just as rapidly.

What are the key conversations that you engage in your current research? What are the main contributions you’d like to make to those conversations? How does your work speak to public concerns beyond the academy? How do you see your relationship to environmental anthropology?

As I was writing my dissertation, I became totally engrossed in conversations happening in anthropology and in the history of science about scientific “fieldwork,” and about what it meant to define particular kinds of outdoor labor as scientific or not. Historians like Michael Reidy and Etienne Benson, anthropologists like Lyle Fearnley, Cori Hayden, and Lisa Messeri, all of these people were digging back into classic stuff on boundary-making around forms of knowledge and on the lab/field border to ask this huge range of questions about how these demarcations affect politics, commerce, and everyday life. And, at the same time, other anthropologists like Hugh Gusterson, Sophia Roosth, and Stefan Helmreich were already following all kinds of scientific work in and out of computer simulations to see how our ideas of ethics, justice, and even life itself change when our virtual forests and other research objects are staring out at us from computer screens all day.

At the same time, I’d gotten really excited about meeting people who worked on issues surrounding science and technology with First Nations and other indigenous communities, people who have read the whole lab studies canon and are totally on board with Latour’s critique of the constitution of modernity, but have these incredibly urgent problems to address with groups who are still dealing with the cataclysm of settler colonialism. Interestingly, a lot of these people really don’t care whether the label “STS” gets applied to their work or not, maybe partly because the STS crowd has effectively ignored indigenous people and politics since forever. But the questions they’re asking – people like Joanna Radin, Jennifer Hamilton, and Kristen Simmons – really shake the foundations of science studies, since they show all of these presumptions about access and professional mobility and professional ethics that are really, really hard to apply in a lot of indigenous communities in North America.

The main way that I’ve tried to weave my work into these conversations is by taking up the individual, subjective dimensions of identity politics as a kind of linking force, as this set of complex and sometimes contradictory demands that force people doing technical work to articulate their obligations to themselves and their various social groups in different ways. Or to put it another way, I’m trying to show how all of this boundary-making and demarcation work that STS folks typically use to characterize entire professions are increasingly worked out within individual lives and everyday life. And I think this is something that starts to become a lot more apparent when you’re looking at historically weak institutions like a First Nations resource management office, or a once-monolithic one that’s starting to erode under deregulation, like a national forest service. In a lot of ways, environmental anthropologists have been leading the conversation on these topics. People like Andrew Mathews, Tania Li, and Andrea Ballestero have done a wonderful job showing how people working for government agencies, NGOs, community forest management boards, and other institutions draw their ideas about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how resource management should work from a heterogeneous range of sources. As I progress with my work, I hope to be able to build on this to show how the pressures rural researchers feel to present themselves as particular kinds of individuals and community members cause them to marshal these ideas differently as their lives move along.

You received your PhD from MIT’S doctoral program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS). How do you think graduate training in an interdisciplinary program shaped your project?

I came into anthropology with a background in materials science and engineering, so I’ve always had a bit of a black sheep relationship to the social sciences. I worked as an industrial chemist for a while, and I read people like Donna Haraway and Kim Fortun for fun in my spare time, so I wasn’t necessarily introduced to a lot of these conversations through any kind of disciplinary route. A number of HASTS graduates and current students have followed similar paths. A lot of the students who eventually did ethnographic fieldwork even went as far as considering framing their projects as straight-up historical dissertations before getting the fieldwork bug, and others who came to the program expecting to train as anthropologists wound up getting very invested in archival projects and then moving on to careers as historians. I spent a couple of years thinking primarily about how aerial geophysics and other predecessors to remote sensing technologies were used in resource exploration in the Canadian Arctic in the 1960s. Only later did I look at the contemporary applications of these tools and how they’re still playing roles in First Nations land claims.

Intellectually, it’s been fascinating to see how different communities of scholars have taken up the same theory at different times and in different ways – look at actor-network theory in history and sociology, for instance, as opposed to its much more recent emergence in anthropology. Seeing this fluidity, and recognizing the, I guess to a certain extent the arbitrariness of the application of theory, has been helpful in terms of giving me the confidence to look to other kinds of texts when I’m struggling to find a way into a problem I encounter in my fieldwork, particularly if it’s a problem that just feels overdetermined when I think about it as an anthropological set piece. For instance, thinking about how rural First Nations labor geographies result in fractured kinship obligations might mean one thing if you think about it as an example of contemporary neoliberalism, but it takes on a whole new set of meanings if you remember that First Nations individuals across BC have been traveling long distances for marginal jobs for decades and decades. At the same time, though, this approach has also given me a sincere appreciation for other kinds of disciplinary training, since I still often feel like I’m still learning things about the history of anthropology that a lot of my colleagues learned as nineteen year-old undergrads.

Can you share a bit about your research methods and timeline for this project? How did you explain your research to your interlocutors? What was the most challenging aspect of your research? The most satisfying?

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of this project began with a general interest in exploration techniques. I read old technical journals with articles on post-World War II geological survey reports, a lot of stuff on what it was like to search for uranium back then in the vast, vast areas where a lot of Inuit and First Nations communities had only recently been moved into permanent villages. While I was waiting for grants to get up to some of the more remote communities in northwest British Columbia, I began taking trips to Vancouver and coastal Alaska to talk to forestry researchers and corporate folks promoting mineral exploration projects, basically all of these people who had jobs painting different kinds of pictures of what these rural landscapes looked like for urban audiences in southern Canada. I did some preliminary fieldwork in 2011 and 2012 before spending most of 2013 in northwest BC, where I tried to install myself with a couple of field research teams based in the area. One of the main challenges I faced as I was trying to figure out how to position myself was figuring out how to keep up with my white interlocutors – these ecologists and modelers who were participating in tons of different kinds of projects, from community resource boards, to independent research projects, to knowledge trusts, to activist groups. And on the other side of it, I struggled with how to navigate the fracture and mistrust facing a lot of the Gitxsan and Gitanyow GIS and forestry techs I met, most of whom no longer had any kind of formal connection to any of the band councils or other formally organized governing bodies in the region. At first, I thought that these two very different, very hectic versions of mobility was primarily a practical problem for me as I tried to organize a coherent ethnography, but eventually I realized that it was one of the main problems that I wanted to address in my work. So in both cases, it was really a constant matter of trying to figure out how to define my object of study, since all of these distinctions were porous and shifting.

The way I explained my project during that first year there varied quite a bit, since my sense of what I was doing was constantly changing. But I usually told people that I was interested in how different groups of people made and used maps, and what their lives as researchers and technicians were like on a day-to-day level. I said that I wanted to understand what had happened to the different groups of people who had come together to protest clearcut logging in the region back in the 1980s and ‘90s, these really diverse alliances of NGO workers, white activists, academic scientists, and First Nations leaders and community members. I think this semi-historical dimension was a useful entry point, since a lot of the people I talked to had been really frustrated about how the friendships they formed during these periods had frayed over the years, and that there weren’t many opportunities to talk to each other anymore. Framing things in terms of forestry and mapmaking also made me seem a little less threatening, I think, since tons of activists were coming to the region at the time to protest a whole bunch of different pipelines that various companies were proposing to build through the area. None of them have been built yet, partly because the Canadian federal government changed, but at the time it seemed like the entire northwest was on the verge of turning into one giant fossil fuel corridor, and that terrified a lot of people. But as far as I was concerned, a lot of these battle lines had been drawn during these earlier forestry conflicts, and it was really satisfying to give people from these earlier alliances some space to share their concerns about how the other struggles they’d coped with since then were destabilizing their efforts to make connections and come together again.

The paper you submitted for the Rappaport prize is entitled “Aging in digital: Simulating succession in the normal forest.” It is a rich and fascinating piece that examines a long-running competition between two computer-based forest growth models in order to undersand how those models mediate the careers and emotional investments of environmental scientists. Reading the essay, I was struck by your observation that the models have transformed the way scientists experience time. Can you tell the audience about the paper’s argument and how it emerged? Do you remember any particular “a ha” moments when these ideas began to gel?

The piece I submitted for the Rappaport competition was part of my attempt to bring together two very different worlds of government forestry research where I did some of my fieldwork – one heavily centralized, very powerful group of programmers based in the provincial capital in Victoria, and a more amorphous network of academics and government dissidents – I guess you might call them – based in northwest BC. In addition to trying to show what the forest looks like from these different vantage points as a research object or operational goal or natural space or whatever, I also wanted to show how the people who had built careers within these two worlds were coping with professional succession crises in totally different ways. The main argument that I offer in the paper is that the basic notion of a powerful idea or theory that emerges from quite a bit of STS scholarship – something that links together all kinds of different technical operations and commercial strategies, something that a heterogeneous group of actors has to agree upon in some basic sense in order for the whole assemblage to function – I wanted to argue that this portrait of agency pretty seriously misrepresents the kinds of epistemic compromises that individual researchers often have to make in order for any form of social succession to operate. People in Victoria spent a lot of time talking to me about everything they had done to make their particular forest growth model “indispensable” for government operation and resource planning, but a lot of these people were getting ready to retire, they knew that the Forest Service wasn’t going to be able to hire replacements for most of them, and a lot of them were really despairing about whether these trade offs had been worth it.

The intellectual questions that led me into this part of the project were fairly simple at the start, too. I had spent a lot of time reading the history and philosophy of science literature on computer simulation when I was getting ready for my fieldwork, and it really struck me how little this literature had to say about the personal experience of being a modeler, and of looking at a computer model as your life’s work. Even though her book Beamtimes and Lifetimes came out decades ago, I don’t think anybody has done a better job than Sharon Traweek in really working through what it’s like to grow old in a laboratory setting. Talking to a lot of modelers who were about to retire gave me a chance to see how these anxieties could play out on several different timescales at once, since each new iteration of these peoples’ models articulated another hope for how their work might shape the landscape after they were gone, too. I had a lot of sympathy for both groups of researchers, but in terms of using their modeling work to deal with the emotional consequences of precariousness, I really came to identify with the way that this rural-based research group explicitly left the question of legacy wide open by making their simulator freely available and encouraging people to use it and adapt it for whatever new problems they saw.

What are you working on now (or next)?

I’ll be joining the anthropology faculty at Johns Hopkins University in the fall, which means I’ll need to finish revising my dissertation into a book manuscript fairly soon – for what it’s worth, I’m hoping to call the book Salvage Cartographies: Mapping Futures in a Northern Forest. As I do all of that, I’m going to be broadening the scope of the dissertation a bit to look at a pair of archives that were assembled through some of the earliest government forestry science and Gitxsan land claims research in BC. In both of these places, I’m still looking at how identity politics is shaping different researchers’ senses of their respective vocations, since both archives were largely assembled by people without high-status professional titles, and who have conflicted relationships to the institutions these archives are meant to represent. I’ve recently been back to BC to talk to these people about who uses these archives and to what ends, and to see how their personal work as archivists – work which for both of them has been largely unpaid and unrecognized – has alternately shaped their sense of investment in government forestry and in the ongoing Gitxsan sovereignty project.

I’ve also been doing a bit more preliminary work on my second project, which will bring me back the mineral exploration work I first looked into when I was beginning my dissertation fieldwork. Now that the brief prospecting craze has come and gone, I’m planning to plot out the rise and fall of rare earth minerals exploration in northwest North America as a way to see how emergent technology development and investment schemes interpolate rural communities and individuals within particular kinds of collective futures. Rare earth elements, these weird things like dysprosium and neodymium, obscure metals that you need for iphone components and wind turbines and electric cars, are commodities whose uses and values are constantly changing. In the process of promoting speculative projects in BC, Alaska, and Yukon and Northwest Territories, then, state geological surveys, exploration companies, and First Nations development corporations are all telling these very depressed rural communities near potential mines what to invest in, what to care about, and what to alter their landscapes for, and what kinds of futures they should be looking forward to.

Since the rare earths exploration boom essentially came and went in the span of about three years, this is essentially a postmortem, but a lot of small business and First Nations-led commercial projects and investment agreements were started during this period. What I want to know is, how has all of this promotion and movement, even if hardly anything was actually taken out of the ground, how has it changed what we think of as a common good? How does thinking about an object of, say, speculative finance as a common good change the way we expect these objects – penny stocks, basically – to be regulated and cared for? And how does promoting a potential common good specifically through appeals to individual aspiration alter the way rural towns articulate their shared interests? The boom-bust cycles of mineral exploration might seem like blips on the radar if you live in a big city, but even as predictable as these project failures seem to be, they can be devastating for isolated villages like those where I work in the north. Thinking about the many imaginative ways that these places cohere as shared living spaces strikes me as a decent first step towards figuring out new ways to talk about these disruptions and their emotional fallout.